Large and mid-sized companies, particularly those in science and technology industries, often have a great need to procure publications relating to the company's research and development efforts. Many of these companies have a large staff or company library dedicated to the identification of documents required by the company's researchers. The effort to obtain the desired documents is often expensive and plagued by a variety of inefficiencies.
A major drawback experienced by the in-house document retrieval model described above is the failure to comply with applicable copyright rights and regulations. Copyright-protected documents require a purchaser of the document to first obtain the appropriate copyright clearance and permissions from the document's publisher.
In conventional arrangements, in house library services frequently search for and identify desired documents on an ad hoc basis, failing to leverage inherent efficiencies in the copyright clearance and order fulfillment aspects of the process. Often, these types of systems lack a centralized management of documents which allows for the copyright-compliant reprinting of a document when faced with a later request of a previously ordered document.
Furthermore, the in-house staff and related systems are limited in their ability to identify documents which are not maintained in an internal repository and connect with the appropriate publisher or external source of documents.
An additional drawback to the existing ad hoc document management methods and systems present in the prior art is the natural barrier created in the distribution of research and development and technical documents to the researchers and scientists of the company. Specifically, by failing to efficiently track and manage previously requested documents and/or provide access to externally-available documents, the company fails to maximize the flow of information to the R&D staff, thus hampering the company's overall research and development efforts.
The above-described inefficiencies and lack of centralized management of the document control and delivery process results in conventional approaches to document management which are expensive to implement and manage. Therefore, there is a need for a method and a system for efficiently and effectively implementing, managing, administering, and monitoring a document management and delivery program.